The Wedding Ringer (15.)
Directed by Jeremy Garelick.
Starring Josh Gad, Kevin Hart, Kaley Cuoco-Sweeting, Jorge Garcia, Affion Crockett and Olivia Thirlby. 101 mins
The Wedding Ringers is all over the shop, a berserk, random grab bag of items from the comedy aisle. It is gross in places, sweet in others, very occasionally witty and more occasionally dumbly entertaining. It stumbles along rather desperately but in the last third it finds a formula that works and almost, almost, won me round.
The portly, nerdy Doug (Gad) is getting married to out-of-his-league Gretchen (Cuoco-Sweeting.) It is a big do and with ten days to go her family are fussing over the arrangements while he is fretting over not having any male friends to invite to the wedding, let alone be his best man. Enter Best Man for Hire Jimmy (Hart) who for $50,000 will fill that role and put together a rag tag group of seven to act as his male buddies; a kind of matrimonial Reservoir Dogs.
The cast is as random and varied a selection as the jokes. Why would the Broadway star of The Book Of Mormom and voice of the snowman in Frozen (Gad), or the girl from The Big Bag Theory (Sweeting) chose a film in which an old lady is set on fire for laughs as their launch pad to film stardom? That Hart would submit to appearing in it goes without saying. His pipsqueak Chris Tucker routine seems to be gaining real traction with audiences who want to have a good laugh and don't want it encumbered with all the fiddly, elitish wit stuff. He works rather well in the role; previous screen appearances have seen him jumping around frantically trying to attract attention but he is calmer here and better for it.
The Wedding Ringer (15.)
Directed by Jeremy Garelick.
Starring Josh Gad, Kevin Hart, Kaley Cuoco-Sweeting, Jorge Garcia, Affion Crockett and Olivia Thirlby. 101 mins
The Wedding Ringers is all over the shop, a berserk, random grab bag of items from the comedy aisle. It is gross in places, sweet in others, very occasionally witty and more occasionally dumbly entertaining. It stumbles along rather desperately but in the last third it finds a formula that works and almost, almost, won me round.
The portly, nerdy Doug (Gad) is getting married to out-of-his-league Gretchen (Cuoco-Sweeting.) It is a big do and with ten days to go her family are fussing over the arrangements while he is fretting over not having any male friends to invite to the wedding, let alone be his best man. Enter Best Man for Hire Jimmy (Hart) who for $50,000 will fill that role and put together a rag tag group of seven to act as his male buddies; a kind of matrimonial Reservoir Dogs.
The cast is as random and varied a selection as the jokes. Why would the Broadway star of The Book Of Mormom and voice of the snowman in Frozen (Gad), or the girl from The Big Bag Theory (Sweeting) chose a film in which an old lady is set on fire for laughs as their launch pad to film stardom? That Hart would submit to appearing in it goes without saying. His pipsqueak Chris Tucker routine seems to be gaining real traction with audiences who want to have a good laugh and don't want it encumbered with all the fiddly, elitish wit stuff. He works rather well in the role; previous screen appearances have seen him jumping around frantically trying to attract attention but he is calmer here and better for it.
